Sarah Palin can’t raise your taxes. She can’t send your children to war. Yet almost five years after her failed bid to occupy Number One Observatory Circle, Palin’s Pavlovian effect on rabid liberals (and not a few conservatives) is only slightly diminished.

Come to think of it, it’s one thing that so-called progressives and I can agree on in this supposedly “divisive” era:

Sarah Palin annoys all the “right” people.

Witness the reaction last week when Palin took a poke at Jeb Bush’s blunt assertion that America needs more Mexican immigrants because they “are more fertile,” a fact some of us view as more of a bug than a feature.

“The Census Bureau just reported that for the first time in American history, deaths among white Americans now outpace the white birth rate.”

Addressing the same conference the next day, Palin—a mother of five —said, “I think it’s kind of dangerous territory…to want to debate this over one race’s fertility rate over another. And I say that as someone who’s kind of fertile herself.”

If your reaction to that demi-quip is “So?” or “LOL,” then you obviously aren’t a columnist for the Washington Post.

Kathleen Parker is, but she clearly isn’t familiar with the ancient journalistic “rule” that “three is a trend.” Her latest column, inspired by Palin’s throwaway line, began with the proclamation, “Distilled to a slogan, politics of late goes something like this: ‘I’m more fertile than you are.’”

Parker’s only other evidence that “fecundity is emerging as the best argument for public office, policy or even citizenship” comes from former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s surgically enhanced lips.

Trying to shoo away pesky questions from a conservative reporter about the Gosnell trial, Pelosi huffed that as “a mother of five children” and a “practicing and respectful Catholic,” the topic of “abortion” was “sacred ground.”

(Dear Nancy: Abortion was never actually declared the eighth sacrament—that was just a Flo Kennedy joke.)

And, yes: Nancy Pelosi does have five children, just like Sarah Palin.

Yet oddly enough, those children have never been the punch line of Louis CK or Bill Maher jokes. Neither has amateur gynecologist Andrew Sullivan shown the slightest interest in Pelosi’s uterus and its issues and tissues.

Revealingly, those three men are all fixated on one of Palin’s children in particular: the one with Down syndrome. I’ll leave it to more qualified individuals to diagnose their strange obsession with this cute, harmless tot in part because trying to analyze it myself gives me the creeps.

Most liberals, especially the gay ones, are plum disgusted by Palin’s fecundity in general (while ignoring Pelosi’s).

Note the unreserved expressions of disgust in the comments beneath almost any article about the Duggar family of television’s 19 Kids and Counting fame. If you think you can stand it, check out the 300+ responses to this notorious SFGate article entitled, “God Does Not Want 16 Kids / Arkansas mom gives birth to a whole freakin’ baseball team. How deeply should you cringe?” Not a few of these tolerant, peace-and-love Obama voters fantasize about Mrs. Duggar’s death, hopefully before she can reproduce again.